HAYWARD -- AC Transit's chief financial officer used more than $500,000 taken from one of Oakland's largest churches to pay for a luxury car, private schools for his children, mortgage payments and a golf club membership, according to court documents filed last week.

Lewis Green Clinton Jr., 57, has been charged with four counts of grand theft for embezzling the money from Allen Temple Baptist Church in East Oakland between April 2007 and February 2013, according to television station CBS5. He is a parishioner at the 5,000-member church and served on three overlapping volunteer boards.

AC Transit spokesman Clarence Johnson said Clinton was placed on indefinite administrative leave Monday, but added that he was not aware of any connection between the DA's investigation and the agency's own finances.

Clinton, who has worked for more than 25 years in the financial field, was hired as the transit district's chief financial officer in 2008. He also serves as a trustee for the AC Transit Retirement Board and earned $279,000 in total compensation in 2012, according to a Bay Area News Group public salary database.

Attempts to reach Clinton, who lives in Vallejo, were unsuccessful Monday evening.

Since 2007, Clinton served as board president of two corporations established by the church to provide housing and other services to parishioners and others in need in Oakland while also running the Allen Temple Foundation to receive philanthropic gifts and endowments from benefactors. The inspector's report notes that due to deaths and resignations, Clinton was eventually the sole member of the Allen Temple Foundation board.

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Neither the Rev. Daniel Buford nor the Rev. J. Alfred Smith Jr. of Allen Temple Baptist Church were available for comment Monday night.

Clinton was arraigned Monday at the Hayward Hall of Justice and is free on $100,000 bail.

The report alleges that from 2007 to 2012, Clinton illegally diverted $400,000 that the church obtained from the sale of cell phone tower rights to his checking account.

The Allen Temple Baptist Church in East Oakland. (Ray Chavez/staff file)

Clinton used ATM and debit card withdrawals to take another $66,000 from church bank accounts from March 2008 through February 2013, the DA's report says, and he took more than $100,000 from a church account at a credit union between 2008 and 2011.

Clinton allegedly transferred funds into a checking account for Eagle Asset Management, which he alone owned and controlled, according to district attorney's office inspector James Taranto.

The majority of the thefts were not discovered until March 2013, when officials at one of the funds noticed a irregular shortage in operating capital and began investigating.

In previous years, a church official had asked Clinton about high board expenses, but Clinton, the board president, reassured her that the expenses were appropriate. Clinton held a "position of trust" with the various charity funds, the report says.